


Rise Up

by lonelywalker



Category: Dexter (TV)
Genre: AU, Age Difference, Community: hc_bingo, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-25
Updated: 2011-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-20 17:40:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Lundy leaves for Oregon, Debra discovers she's pregnant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rise Up

“Lundy.”

She’s missed his voice: the quiet assurance in every word, the smile on his lips, the way little ever seems to faze him.

“Hey.” He still has the same cellphone number, but she hasn’t called it in months. He’s been out in Portland hunting down a monster of a serial killer – she’s read the news reports online – and she’s been busy sinking into denial at home.

“Debra! How are you?”

She can imagine him putting down his files, taking off his glasses, leaning back in his office chair with absolutely no idea of the way she’s about to tear his life apart. Not even Special Agent Rockstar could anticipate that.

“I’m pregnant.”

 _Is it mine?_ Ever since she knew for sure, she’s run this conversation over in her head a thousand times, driving herself so crazy with the possibilities for heartbreak and disaster that she’d considered not telling him at all. Even so, she’s betting on this being his response, his first question, with all its awful insinuations.

He takes a breath. She doesn’t allow herself that luxury.

“I’ll catch a flight tomorrow,” Frank says. “I’m not sure when, but I’ll be there.”

“Thank you,” she says, tears on the mouthpiece, pitifully grateful.

He arrives the next evening, still in his FBI suit when she picks him up from the airport, gym bag over his shoulder. He looks tired, but somehow more gorgeous in life than he’d ever managed to be in her memories, and he hugs her tight before she can even worry about whether they’re on handshaking or kissing terms these days.

“ _Fuck_ , Frank,” she whispers.

“I know, honey, I know.”

She takes him home to her new place, their conversation mixed up between the safe topic of his case in Oregon and her far more complex situation here in Miami. It’s been three months since he left, about six weeks since she got it through her stubbornness that the nausea and weight gain weren’t just some stupid girlish reaction to yet another failed relationship. Five weeks and six days of denial and indecisiveness and hanging up every time she tried to get up the nerve to call him.

If anyone is absolutely, totally not meant to be a mother it has to be her, right? _Fuck_ if she’s going to get fat with some guy’s kid and ruin her career as well as her body, push out a fucking watermelon just to wipe up shit and deal with crying for months on end. But, somewhere in all those weeks, she’d decided to keep the baby. Maybe in part because she knows she’s not going to get a better sperm donor than Frank Lundy, maybe because, in the few moments she’s laid a hand on the growing curve of her belly without totally freaking out, it’s felt like maybe, perhaps, in some fucking miracle universe, it might just be okay.

She kisses him in the parking lot, pressing him up against her car without thinking, until she’s already doing it, whether this is what he wants at all. “Is this okay?” she asks. Maybe he’s seeing someone. Maybe he’s become a monk. She has no fucking-

But Frank’s kissing her back before she can even complete the thought, deep and hungry, the way he had when all of their feelings for each other had finally been laid bare after weeks of tentative friendship. “Debra,” he says, touching his fingertips to her cheek. “This is far better than okay.”

They have so much to discuss – she even has a fucking _list_ involving child support and living arrangements and calling lawyers as if they’ve just been involved in a minor traffic accident. But inside her apartment, she switches on the lights and he drops his bag and then their arms are around each other as if he’s never been away.

“Why the _fuck_ did you leave?” she finds herself murmuring against his lips, her fingers in his hair as she pushes him towards her bedroom.

She can see all possible answers in his eyes, but what he says is: “I’m an idiot.” And that’s good enough for her.

No one but a doctor has seen her naked since him, and she’s embarrassed for him to see her now: her washboard stomach gone, her breasts swollen and sore, her entire body out of control for the first time since she was a gawky teenager.

He peels off her shirt with almost surgical precision, his palm predictably moving to cup her naked belly. There’s barely anything there yet. If she wasn’t so damn careful about her diet and fitness regime no one would be able to tell. But she’d know anyway. She has Frank’s baby inside her, growing relentlessly. Soon she’ll be able to feel it, moving beneath her skin, freaking her the _fuck_ out…

Frank kisses her cheek, featherlight. “You’re beautiful.”

“Oh don’t start with that motherfucking ‘glowing’ shit,” she warns, and his grin lights up his eyes.

“I’ve missed that mouth of yours, Morgan.”

She’s missed all of him, and she needs all of him now, tugging at his belt, tearing off his shirt, and pushing him down onto the bed. They’d had so many concerns before – their age difference, their careers – but it all seems so stupid now when the feeling of his skin hot on hers is all she needs, whether he’s sixty or thirty, whether she’s devoted to her job or a slacker living in someone’s basement.

He gets hard so easily under her hand, his fingers ghosting over her breasts, that at least one of her worries is instantly relieved. His breaths are shallow as he looks up at her, and she wants him now more than she ever has, more than their first time when she knew that the Butcher was one of their own, more than when she had been terrified that he would leave her.

She pulls off his pants, his briefs, and moves over him. She’s wetter than she’s ever been, open and begging for him, and he arches up as she sinks down onto him, kissing her hard and moving so perfectly inside her.

“Don’t… fucking leave again,” she gasps, holding back her moans of pleasure. No one’s ever been able to make her feel like this. Mad skills for the fucking _win_.

She can see his smile, genuine as genuine can be, as he cups her face in his hands and kisses her again. “Wouldn’t dare.”

Maybe it’s him, maybe the baby, maybe her self-enforced celibacy over the last few months, but she doesn’t last long - _can’t_ , the way he’s so damn big inside her, rubbing up against her clit, pushing buttons she didn’t even know she had.

It’s all _too_ damn right, she thinks as her body stutters, tightening up around him as she’s flooded with joy she can barely comprehend, crying out what’s probably a torrent of curses. If they can be this good, why did he ever leave? Why didn’t she call him? Why didn’t they fucking track each other down in person or on the internet and just fucking _make_ this work?

He hugs her tight to him, just as she’s limp and breathless, bucking up into her hard before she feels that hot spill of him inside her and he gasps her name, finally falling back against the sheets and taking her with him. He’s slick with sweat, but she doesn’t move away, kissing his chest, feeling that reassuring pressure of him inside her.

“You have to go,” she says after a few minutes, when their breathing is quieter, when the silence seems scarier than the question.

“Tomorrow,” he says, licking dry lips. “We’re close to a suspect. I told them I had a family emergency. They still didn’t like it. But I’ll be back. I’ve got a stack of retirement paperwork to get through in Langley once I close this case, and then I’m all yours.” He reaches to touch her belly again. “And yours,” he adds with a grin.

Retirement. He’s only – what? – fifty-eight? But she can’t question it tonight. “How can you be so fucking _calm_?” she demands.

She sees the way he moves his lips, stops himself, and tries again: “I’m a good actor.”

Debra’s never seen him scared, never seen him more than vaguely troubled, but now she has to wonder just what might have been going on behind those cool eyes all the time she’s known him. “I’ll be almost eighty by the time this kid goes to college. And…” His hand moves to stroke along her thigh. “You’re going to hit me if I ask you to marry me, aren’t you?”

She smacks him in the head with a pillow, barely holding back a laugh. He _is_ a great profiler, after all.

“An above board kind of guy,” she muses, settling back into his arms, the night air cooling their bodies. “How about we really do take it slow this time?”

He brushes a lock of hair from her cheek. Takes a breath. “Knowing you… Knowing us… I don’t know how good we’ll be at that.”

“Go crack your case,” Deb tells him. “Do your paperwork. And then, maybe if you don’t hate Miami too much…”

“You still got that parka?” Frank asks suddenly.

“And a fucking tuque,” she says.

The night stretches out before them as they talk of long-planned trips to frozen lakes, of ultrasounds and diaper changes, of serial killers and engagement rings. Every option brings with it its own fears and concerns, from the simple tasks of telling Dex and Frank’s daughter, to the idea of sharing an entire life together, waking up and having him beside her for the rest of their lives.

But for a birth control fuck up – or some kind of divine intervention – she might never have seen him again. And now, even though the baby had seemed like the end of her career (if not her entire life), everything seems possible.

“By the way,” he says, laughter in his voice. “Is it mine?”

She thumps him with the pillow again.


End file.
